Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives from April 2009
Mindful that the mission of the Department of Justice is largely to “enforce the law” and “seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior,” we have made this recommendation in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr.: Appo...
A false claim is wafting through the press: Obama is hanging tough with Benjamin Netanyahu, he’s going to “twist Israel’s arm” and at long last force the Jewish state into a two-state agreement, settling the Israel-Palestine question for good...
In early April, the jury in Ward Churchill’s civil trial against the University of Colorado found, in his favor, that the University had fired him because of critical remarks he made after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. While Churchill awaits a h...
There’s a phenomenon in complexity science called “path dependence”. It’s the kind of blind persistence ants display when following pheromone trails back to a table from which the picnic basket has long since been removed. It’s a common...
According to a lot of mainstream thinking Asia is weathering the current economic meltdown. “Asians are taking the economic collapse far more calmly than many in the west,” writes David Pilling, Asian editor for the Financial Times. The region he says, &...
When Bush administration lawyers wrote their memos authorizing extreme interrogation tactics at Guantanamo, they had to conjure up horrible images: Prisoners gagging and sputtering as their interrogators reproduced the sensation of drowning. Human heads slammed repe...
In 2006, international health expert Richard Feachem told audiences at Cambridge University at a Darwin lecture that the world’s capacity to deal with pandemics was dangerously inadequate. His interest then, as now, was combating various pandemics, many ...
When Americans get "ethical" these days they ponder the great moral mysteries, like "Is public health coverage fair to insurance companies?" or "If we increase the military budget but reduce one section of it, can the whole world still be sa...
Since counterinsurgency was first bandied about in US bureaus and agencies in the early sixties, the idea has been associated with western ideas of economic development and modernization – dissolving a backward traditional society and building a vigorous moder...
GIs and Iraqis still dying in battle in Iraq. An increase in troops and air attacks in Afghanistan. Civilian casualties on the rise. Despite campaign promises to begin bringing US troops home from Iraq in 2009, the number of US troops in Iraq remains virtually uncha...
On President Obama’s 100th day in office the White House asked Congress to address the issue of disparity in penalties for the use of powder/crack cocaine. This historic request follows a national lobby day held yesterday that was co-sponsored by a dozen advoc...
In the general elections held on Sunday 26 April, Ecuadorians granted their president Rafael Correa a new four-year mandate. He took over 52% of the votes, placing him more than 20 points ahead of Lucio Gutierrez, his main opponent, the former right-wing president wh...
Since the publication last week of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report into detainee abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo (...
So the Democrats have yet another supporter of aggressive war, oligarchy, authoritarianism and torture in their Senate ranks. Wow, that will certainly shake up the political landscape in Washington! It looks like the promised New Jerusalem of hope and change has wel...
DOUG HENWOOD: We’re now joined by William Robinson, who is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California in Santa Barbara, someone I met about six or seven years ago at a conference and, although I’ve disagreed with him on some issues, I thoug...
For Iceland’s voters in the election last Saturday the issues were more pragmatic than a supposed unseating of the right by the left, the trend most emphasized in news coverage. The country’s main problem is reckless neoliberal bank privatization a...
Karen Ignagni is not the problem.
As president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, Karen Ignagni represents the health insurance industry.
The same health insurance industry that would be wiped out by a single payer national health insurance sys...
For almost a generation, the Democrats in Congress have been able to pretend to be the party of ordinary working people, the party of progressives, and the inheritor of the mantel of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, all the while doing little of substance and ca...
The Man giveth, and The Man taketh away. Forty years ago, when Americans — lots of Americans – made things, more of them died in a year on the job than died in a year fighting in Vietnam. This never registered much in the national consciousness. De...
Representatives John Conyers and Jerrold Nadler are officially asking Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint an independent Special Prosecutor “to investigate and, where appropriate, prosecute” participants in the Bush-era US torture system. “A Sp...
Kabul.
Hamid Karzai, who played host to the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, in Kabul two days ago, will have been delighted to hear the Prime Minister confirm the long-standing Afghan belief that there can be no long-term success against the Taliban in ...
At the bottom of the recent demonstrations that have packed the capital city of Tbilisi with tens of thousands of protesters demanding the resignation of Georgian President Mikheil Saakavili is an investigation by the European Union (EU) as to who started last summe...
Recently the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice asked me to write an article for them with my ideas of how grassroots activists could better use the internet for real change. As a member of the group, I was happy to tackle that assignment, and here are my though...
On April 8th, 2009 the news broke in the U.S. media of “a riveting high-seas drama [in which] an unarmed American crew wrested control of their U.S.-flagged cargo ship from Somali pirates … and sent them fleeing to a lifeboat with the captain as hostage....
Just like that perfect sweater, a financial transactions tax (FTT) would look just great on those Wall Street bankers and financiers. A modest tax, which would be too small for normal investors to even notice, could easily raise more than $100 billion a year. That&r...